The Gates of Hormuz

How a Portuguese Poet Envisioned the World of Global Trade

Not too long ago, I found myself standing at the top of a ridge that jutted out into the ocean. To my left was the Persian Gulf, to my right the Gulf of Oman, and straight ahead, about fifty miles as the drone flies, was Hormuz.

The ridge belongs to Oman, even though it is not contiguous with the rest of the kingdom, whose bulk is located farther down the Arabian Peninsula. Because of its strategic location, it has long been inaccessible to tourists. Military installations monitored the comings and goings of ships through the Strait.

This state of affairs started to change in the 2000s, when the area cautiously opened up to tourism. A new road was built and a hotel opened. Visitors from the United Arab Emirates, especially nearby Sharjah and Dubai, could visit and spend the night. This is what I did with a friend, Paulo Horta, who lives in Abu Dhabi. We drove up through Sharjah and, after sorting out some visa problems (entirely my fault), took the winding road along the coast to the small town of Khasab, which boasts the largest natural harbor in the area.

The ridge is breathtakingly beautiful with steep, inaccessible mountains, some over 6,000 feet high. People call it the Norway of Arabia. Unlike the fjords of Norway, the ridge looks across at Iran, cut off but also connected by trade. The harbor is busiest very early in the morning, when countless small motorized boats return from the other side, part of a robust smuggling operation that has existed here forever but that has taken on particular urgency since 2006, when different forms of sanctions were imposed on Iran. When the smuggling was done for the day, we were able to rent a boat and spent the day cruising the fjords. Friendly dolphins were following us and we even managed to scramble up one of the peaks.

On a map, the ridge looks like the point of a needle, which is fitting since I think of it as an instrument that registers the state of global trade. While I was standing there all seemed calm, but I could feel the needle quivering ever so slightly. The breathtaking beauty and the friendly dolphins couldn’t quite hide the tensions that were being registered subliminally.

A Seismograph of Geopolitics

Control of the Strait of Hormuz has always been a balance between keeping things flowing and interrupting that flow. History shows that it’s not that easy to shut the Strait down entirely. Even now, during the current war with Iran, the odd oil tanker is making it through, and I suspect that some of the small smuggling boats might still be active as well. The needle is a seismograph of geopolitics.

It’s a seismograph with a history. There were reminders of this history all along the coast, ruins of villages and even forts nestled at the foot of these steep mountains, accessible only by boat, blending in perfectly with the earthen tones of the landscape. Most prominent is a fort the Portuguese built in the 17^th century, and Hormuz, on the other side, has remnants of Portuguese settlements as well. They are part of a pattern I have been noticing in recent years. Seemingly whenever I have found myself at strategic locations throughout the globe, I’ve stumbled across f Portuguese forts, from San Domingo, near Taipei, to Goa, in India. There are others I haven’t visited, including A Famosa, which controls the Strait of Malacca, the busiest spice route in the world, and Massawa, which controls the mouth of the Red Sea.

[Video by Martin Puchner, Musandam Peninsula]

The Portuguese recognized the Strait of Hormuz as a chokepoint of geopolitics and trade. It’s a chokepoint much like the Khyber Pass, the gateway between Central Asia and India, or the Thermopylae, the narrow coastal pass between Greece and Persia, all places where empires clash over and over again. Discussions of European empires and their aftermaths have been focused largely on England and France, with their thirst for occupying large swaths of land. But before them came the Portuguese, who had a very different strategy. Instead of occupying land, they focused on controlling access, which is why they focused on the chokepoints of global trade—places like Hormuz.

A Poet of Global Trade

The Portuguese identified these global chokepoints by interviewing returning sailors, traders, soldiers, and spies and then turned all this information into a new geopolitical view of the world. There was another profession crucial for this endeavor: poets. Or rather, there was one poet, Luis de Camoes (c. 1524-80), the first writer to realize that the map of the world was being redrawn. Camoes was in a good position to do so because he started out as a soldier and adventurer, living for sixteen years between the new imperial outposts in Goa, Malacca, Macao, and Mozambique. His work, an epic called The Portuguese (Os Lusíadas), would capture the imagination of the burgeoning Portuguese trading empire.

Camoes’s models were classical, above all the Odyssey with its famous sea-faring hero, but unlike previous writers, Camoes wasn’t overawed by Homer. On the contrary, he was struck by how provincial the Greek epic was: Odysseus puttered around the eastern Mediterranean, while he had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, crossed the Arabian Sea to Goa, and ventured as far east as Macao. Yes, Homer had created the great blueprint for how to write about wars and sea voyages, but Portuguese sailors had far outdone their Greek predecessors. Camoes decided it was time for Portuguese poets to do the same.

Camoes proceeded to write a new kind of epic, one that showed the Portuguese going “where no man has gone before,” which would become the famous slogan of Star Trek. Camoes’s Captain Kirk was Vasco da Gama, the first Portuguese to round the Cape of Good Hope. Camoes’s epic follows him all the way up the Eastern coast of Africa and finally, after many travails, across the Arabian Sea to Goa, India.

Of course it wasn’t true that no man had gone to Goa before. Lots of people had, including Arab sailors. Even Camoes had to admit that it was an Arab navigator who helped the hapless da Gama find his way across the Arabian Sea. Once the Portuguese arrived in India, they had another surprise waiting for them. The locals laughed at the poor quality of the wares the Portuguese had brought to trade, especially textiles. The only thing that was impressive about the Portuguese was the size of their ships and the firepower of their cannons. Over time they managed to control trading outposts and eventually figured out what the Goans were actually willing to buy.

There was one problem: the Arab navigators who had hitherto dominated naval trade didn’t want to give up control. The Portuguese were therefore drawn into a long-term war of attrition for dominance of the Arabian Sea. The war was in full force when Camoes, following in da Gama’s wake some seventy years later, may have found himself in these waters. By this time, the Portuguese had learned to focus their cannons on a few well-chosen chokepoints, above all the entrances to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the two key access routes for the Arabian Sea trade.

Camoes describes those chokepoints toward the end of his epic poem, when he captures how Portuguese sailors would make their way out of the Red Sea and around the Arabian Peninsula and into the Strait of Hormuz to make battle with Arab ships and armies:

Look at Dhofar, renowned because it sends
Its fragrant incense to the altars of the church;
And notice this: just on the other side
Of Ras al-Hadd and all its barren shores,
Begins the kingdom of Hormuz, which then extends
Along the coasts that will one day be famous
When the galleys of the Turk and all his fleet
Must face the naked sword of Castelbranco.

Look at Cape Asaboro, which is now called
Musandam by the navigators;
Through here enters the gulf that has a chokehold
On the abundant lands of Persia and Arabia.
And here is Bahrain, whose waters are adorned
With precious pearls that imitate
The color of the dawn; and see as well
The Tigris and Euphrates find their way into the salty sea. (Translation is mine)

It’s a bit of a cheap trick on the part of Camoes to be “predicting” what he knows full well will happen, namely that the Portuguese, under Castelbranco, will fight “the Turk,” by which he means Muslim forces, for supremacy. It is likely that Camoes himself participated in some of the battles at the Strait of Hormuz, which would explain the precision with which he captures this terrain and its importance for trade, the incense of Dhofar (in Oman), the pearls of Bahrain, the brackish delta where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet the gulf, and above all the Strait of Hormuz, which holds those two immensely rich lands, Arabia and Persia, in its grip. His “Asaboro” is Qushm Island, which was bombed last week, and his “Musandam” is where I scrambled up a mountain to have a look across the Strait.

What matters more than the question of how much time Camoes spent in the Strait of Hormuz is that he turned the experience into the first global epic. He and his manuscript were almost lost to the world when his boat was shipwrecked by a typhoon (a word the Portuguese adopted from the Chinese ta feng) in the South China Sea. But with luck and grit and the help of locals who rescued him in the Mekong Delta he eventually made it back home.

What his epic, which is largely forgotten outside the Portuguese-speaking world, ushered in was a vision of a multipolar world order focused on the control of trade routes and their contested chokepoints. The forts the Portuguese built in these locations are largely in ruins. But the world they created, and which Camoes was the first to describe, is the world we are living in today.